2014 Bio-IT World Expo Preview

March 20, 2014 | This year’s Bio-IT World Conference & Expo in Boston (April 29-May 1, 2014) will once again play host to thousands of industry and academic colleagues discussing big data, security, cloud computing, trends in IT infrastructure, omics technologies, high-performance computing, data analytics and precision medicine, over three days, across 13 tracks.

We have packed itineraries already. Here is a small sampling of the talks we’ve starred in our program guides.

(If the list looks overwhelming, watch the Apple App Store for the 2014 Bio-IT World Conference & Expo app. The app includes the conference schedule, speakers, maps and real time messages and updates from Bio-IT World. You can create a custom schedule, search by speaker, vote for this year’s poster award winner and more.)

—The Editors

John Quackenbush opens the event. In addition to his computational biology work at Dana Farber, John launched Genospace in 2011 to facilitate genomic data analysis and interpretation, focused on accelerating research and delivering relevant and actionable solutions for personalized medicine. Tuesday, April 29, 4:00 pm

Stephen Friend keynotes on Wednesday. Co-Founder and Director of Sage Bionetworks, and veteran of Merck and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Stephen will be speaking on enabling teams of experts—and the public—to solve complex biomedical problems. Wednesday, April 30, 8:00 am

The final keynote session on Thursday will take the concepts around genomic privacy to new territory. Yaniv Erlich, Principle Investigator and Whitehead Fellow at the Whitehead Institute has garnered plenty of attention for his work identifying individuals from “anonymous” genomic data. Heather Dewey-Hagborg has found a different use for anonymous genomic information. The Ph.D. student and artist creates portraits of individuals using “found DNA” from shed hairs. With our genomic identities available to both the computational biologist and the artist, questions about data privacy take on a whole new meaning. Isaac Kohane, co-director of the Center for Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School, will wrap up the morning with a look at what he feels are the premature eulogies for privacy. Thursday, May 1, 8:00 am

The BioTeam's Chris Dagdigian is slated to deliver his always-challenging annual HPC "trends in the trenches" review. Wednesday, April 30, 11:00 am

Thomas Schilling (Bayer Business Services) will discuss how to bridge the gap between corporate and research IT. Leveraging the best of two worlds for bioinformatics consists of in-house cloud solutions linked to HPC clusters in the R&D ecosystem as well to our external clouds, he says. Wednesday, April 30, 1:55 pm

Dirk Petersen (Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center) will recount the Center’s experience deploying very low cost cloud storage technology in a traditional research HPC environment. Learn how to avoid pitfalls and be able to determine if a solution like this makes sense for your organization. Wednesday, April 30, 4:30 pm

Michael Braxenthaler, with F. Hoffmann-La Roche, and VP, Industry Relations, tranSMART Foundation, will give an update of the tranSMART Foundation one year after its inception, and preview version 1.2 of the open source translational research platform. Wednesday, April 30, 11:00 am

PANEL DISCUSSION: Forming a Collaborative Approach to Develop a Data and Technology Blueprint featuring Muzafar Mirza (Pfizer); Georgina Wood (Novartis); Francis Kendall (Roche); Matt Smith (Bristol-Myers Squibb); and William Turner (AstraZeneca). This cross-pharma consortium will report on discussions around technology, standards and data with a view to creating a common framework for how we process data, especially in the changing data landscape. Thursday, May 1, 10:35 am

John N. Weinstein (The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center) looks at the next-generation clustered heat maps for interactive exploration of The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) data. Wednesday, April 30, 11:30 am

Robert Kuhn takes us on a tour of the UCSC Genome Browser including new features like a tool to analyze sequence variant data and hosting organisms not part of the UCSC infrastructure. Browser views of user data may be saved and shared with colleagues. Wednesday, April 30, 1:55 pm

Stephen Brudz (Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT) introduces BARD (BioAssay Research Database) a new, public web portal that uses a standard representation and common language for organizing chemical biology data. Wednesday, April 30, 2:25 pm

Heidi Rehm (Partners HealthCare Center for Personalized Genetic Medicine) gives an update on the integration of genomic sequencing into medical practice for both diagnostic purposes and screening of healthy adults and newborns. Wednesday, April 30, 4:30 pm

David Altshuler (Broad Institute) presents a global alliance created to nurture a common framework of international standards for how genomic and clinical data are shared in a responsible and effective manner. Thursday, May 1, 10:35 am

Angela Gaudette (Pfizer) shares the pharma’s experience adopting tranSMART. Pfizer has contributed to this open source initiative by enabling the search and visualization of Genome Wide Association Studies within the tranSMART platform. Thursday, May 1, 3:30 pm

PANEL DISCUSSION: Data Liquidity: New “Surge” in the War against Cancer, Diabetes and MS featuring Marcia Kean (Feinstein Kean Healthcare); Gwen Darien (Cancer Support Community); Robert McBurney (Accelerated Cure Project for MS); Kenneth Buetow (Arizona State University) and Dave King (Exaptive). This panel of Data Liquidity Coalition members will present three collaborative projects underway to combat killer and chronic diseases. Each project puts patients at the center, and uses open source technology to enable the seamless usage of data from multiple sources to accelerate basic, translational, clinical and psychosocial research. Wednesday, April 30, 11:00 am